For a manufacturing factory, it is very important to collect and analyze process information efficiently. In general, the manufacturing factory adopts a system provided by an information vender or a special system developed by itself for collecting and analyzing the process information so as to perform various maintenance applications, such as status-monitoring, fault-detection, diagnostics, and prognostics of various kinds of information equipment. Either the system developed by the system vendor or the special system developed by the manufacturing factory lacks standard communication interfaces with respect to various kinds of equipment, different application modules and external systems. Thus, different kinds of programs for collecting and analyzing the process information have to be developed for various kinds of equipment, different maintenance application modules and external systems.
University of Wisconsin and University of Michigan in USA established an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Intelligence Maintenance Systems (IMS), wherein the concept of “Intelligent Maintenance” is presented, which considers that components and machines generally have four operation states: a normal operation state; a degradation state; a maintenance state; and a failure state. When aging phenomena occur, the components or machines generally first experience a series of deteriorating process and then the failure state follows. Hence, if the deteriorating status can be detected and sensed, then preventive maintenance can be made before the failure state occurs. However, the current equipment-information acquisition scheme proposed by the IMS center does not take data management and hardware variations into consideration, thus having poor migration capability of linking to different kinds of information equipment. The D2B (Device-to-Business) concept of IMS does not emphasis on expansibility for various maintenance application modules, thus increasing the difficulty level of adopting different maintenance application modules. Further, the IMS center does not propose any standard mechanism for retrieving and transmitting maintenance-related information.
Hence, there is an urgent need to develop a GED and a mechanism thereof for various IM applications, thereby efficiently connecting to various kinds of information equipment; using an open interface of object-oriented design for solving the expansibility problem of considering various maintenance application modules; and establishing a standard mechanism for information acquisition and transmission, so as to be generic in retrieving and transmitting information for various kinds of information equipment.